Kobo Wants Indie Authors to Buy ISBN Numbers

Kobo wants indie authors who publish via Kobo Writing Life to buy ISBN numbers. This will allow companies like Nielsen who track digital book sales to be able to accurately track sales figures for the purchase of meaningful data.

Kobo has just partnered with Bowker to give Writing Life Authors a discount on ISBN numbers. You can now buy a single ISBN for $100, marked down from $125.

ISBN numbers are critically important for an author to claim ownership of their work and support the self-publishing movement. Over the course of 2014, 30% of all e-books being purchased in the U.S. do not use ISBN numbers and are basically invisible to the industry’s official market surveys and reports; all the ISBN-based estimates of market share reported by Bowker, AAP, BISG, and Nielsen are totally incorrect.

Most research and sales tracking companies have all explicitly stated that they cannot track self-published books which do not use ISBNs, and that the self-published segment of the market might be underrepresented in their numbers. All they can do is make wild assumptions on how well the industry is doing. From time to time we do get somewhat meaningful data from Author Earnings, but they mainly track Amazon sales.

I think all authors who publish via Kobo Writing Life owe it to themselves and their fellow indie authors to purchase an ISBN number. If you fail to do this, indies will continue to be relegated to the shadow realm.

Michael Kozlowski is the Editor in Chief of Good e-Reader. He has been writing about audiobooks and e-readers for the past ten years. His articles have been picked up by major and local news sources and websites such as the CNET, Engadget, Huffington Post and Verge.

ISBN numbers are free in Canada. I do not believe indie authors should have to pay for an ISBN number. Regardless of that fact. A number of indie authors do bother to purchase ISBN authors and the NY Times and others like them choose to pretend indie authors do not exist no matter what they do, so why bother. So I guess they can stay in the shadows, make a little money and stop worrying about the opinion of the NY Times and others like them.

It’s outrageous that Bowker charges over US$200 for 12 ISBNs, as if there’s any cost to them to produce them. It’s criminal and I just won’t do it. There’s no data to suggest that having an ISBN influences sales at all. ISBNs are also not the only way the industry could track indie numbers, if the industry was actually motivated to do so. If it wants to continue making business plans on only those books that have ISBNs, let it starve in the dark. The rest of us are just getting on with it.